Published on: Saturday, 08 December, 2012

Stem cells from blood could be used to test drugs

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on stem cells:

The chief medical ambition of those who study stem cells has
always been that the cells would be used to repair and regenerate
damaged tissue. That's still a long way off, despite rapid progress
exemplified by the presentation of the Nobel Prize next week to
Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University for a key stem-cell
breakthrough. But there's another, less well known application of
stem cells that is already delivering results: disease
modeling.

Dr. Yamanaka used a retrovirus to insert four genes into a mouse
cell to return it to a "pluripotent" state-capable of turning into
almost any kind of cell. Last month a team at Johns Hopkins
University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research,
using a version of Dr. Yamanaka's technique, successfully grew nerve cells from a patient suffering from
a rare disease called Riley-Day syndrome, which is linked to early
mortality, seizures and other symptoms and caused by a fault in one
gene.

Published on: Thursday, 06 December, 2012

Countries that turn their backs on cheap energy lose out

And if cutting carbon emissions is what floats your boat, you
will like shale gas even more. The advent of cheap gas, by
displacing coal from electricity generation, has drastically cut
America's carbon dioxide emissions back to levels last seen in the
early 1990s; per capita emissions are now lower than in the 1960s.
(See charts here and here.) Britain's subsidised dash for renewable
energy has had no such result: wind power is still making a trivial
contribution to total energy use (0.4 per cent) while most
renewable energy comes from wood, the highest-carbon fuel of
all.

Published on: Saturday, 01 December, 2012

Published on: Tuesday, 27 November, 2012

Taleb on emergence and trial and error

My review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book in
the Wall Street Journal:

You don't need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim
Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the
mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead
traders discover "heuristics," or rules of thumb, by trial and
error. These are then formalized by academics into theorems and
taught to new generations of traders, who become slaves to theory,
ignore their own common sense and end by blowing up the system. In
a neat echo of its own thesis, Mr. Taleb's paper making this point
sat unpublished for seven years while academic reviewers tried to
alter it to fit their prejudices.

Published on: Tuesday, 27 November, 2012

Ray Kurzweil's new book

My latest Mind and Matter column is on Ray Kurzweil's
new book:

When an IBM computer program called Deep Blue defeated
Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, wise folk opined that since chess
was just a game of logic, this was neither significant nor
surprising. Mastering the subtleties of human language, including
similes, puns and humor, would remain far beyond the reach of a
computer.

Last year another IBM program, Watson, triumphed at just these
challenges by winning "Jeopardy!" (Sample achievement: Watson
worked out that a long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie
topping was a "meringue harangue.") So is it time to take seriously
the prospect of artificial intelligence emulating human
abilities?

Published on: Saturday, 17 November, 2012

It is not the peacock with big-enough tail that gets to mate, but the one with the biggest tail

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on the connection between our interest in
relative inequality and the theory of sexual selection:

Evolution by sexual selection is an idea that goes back to
Charles Darwin. He had little doubt that it explained much about
human beings, and modern biologists generally agree. One of them
has even put a figure on it, concluding that some 54.8% of
selection in human beings is effectively caused by reproduction of
the sexiest rather than survival of the fittest.

Some years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller in
his book "The Mating Mind" explored the notion that since human
males woo their mates with art, poetry, music and humor, as well as
with brawn, much of the expansion of our brain may have been
sexually selected.

Published on: Saturday, 17 November, 2012

Burning wood is the worst thing you can do for carbon dioxide emissions

I have an opinion article in The Times today:

Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more.
A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to
save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people's
energy bills while Lib Dems, Guardian writers and
Greenpeace activists defend subsidies for fat-cat capitalists and
rich landowners with their snouts in the wind-farm trough. Said
Tories will be inundated with fan mail.

Yet, for all the furore wind power generates, the bald truth is
that it is an irrelevance. Its contribution to cutting carbon
dioxide emissions is at best a statistical asterisk. As Professor
Gordon Hughes, of the University of Edinburgh, has shown, if wind
ever does make a significant contribution to energy capacity its
intermittent nature would require a wasteful "spinning" back-up of
gas-fired power stations, so it would still make no difference to
emissions or might make them worse.

Published on: Saturday, 10 November, 2012

Published on: Monday, 05 November, 2012

All animal vision derives from one common ancestor

My latest Mind and Matter column is on the origin
of vision in animals and a vindication for Darwin:

Until recently it was possible, even plausible, to think that
the faculty of vision had originated several times during the
course of animal evolution. New research suggests not: vision arose
only once and earlier than expected, before 700 million years
ago.

Davide Pisani and colleagues from the National University of
Ireland have traced the ancestry of the three kinds of
"opsin" protein that animals use, in combination with a pigment, to
detect light. By comparing the genome sequences of sponges,
jellyfish and other animals, they tracked the origin of opsins back
to the common ancestor of all animals except sponges, but including
a flat, shapeless thing called a placozoan. Some time after 755
million years ago, the common ancestor of ourselves and the
placozoa duplicated a gene and changed one of the copies into a
recognizable opsin.

Published on: Thursday, 01 November, 2012

The bureaucracy's carbon obsession is distracting

I have an
article in this week's Spectator about ash trees and exotic
pests:

I'm pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a
fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark's trees and spreads by
air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of hope
in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are
not clones - uniformly vulnerable to the pathogen. But it's only a
glimmer: tree parasites, from chestnut blight to pine beauty moth,
have a habit of sweeping through species pretty rampantly, because
trees are so long-lived they cannot evolve resistance in time.

The Forestry Commission's apologists are pleading 'cuts' as an
excuse for its failure to do anything more timely to get ahead of
the threat, but as a woodland owner I am not convinced. An
organisation that has the time and the budget to pore over my every
felling or planting application in triplicate and come back with
fussy and bossy comments could surely spare a smidgen of interest
in looming threats from continental fungi that have been spreading
out from Poland for 20 years. The commission was warned four years
ago of the problem.

Published on: Monday, 29 October, 2012

The return of top predators is good for prey eaten by "mesopredators"

My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall
Street Journal is on wolves and "mesopredators":

The return of the wolf is one of the unexpected ecological
bonuses of the modern era. So numerous are wolves that this fall
Wisconsin and Wyoming have joined Idaho and Montana in opening
wolf-hunting seasons for the first time in years. Minnesota follows
suit next month; Michigan may do so next year. The reintroduced wolves
of Yellowstone National Park have expanded to meet the expanding
packs of Canada and northern Montana.

The same is happening in Europe. Wolf populations are rising in
Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, while in recent years wolves have
recolonized France, Germany, Sweden and Norway, and have even been
seen in Belgium and the Netherlands. Nor are wolves the only "apex
predators" to boom in this way. In the U.S., bears and mountain
lions are spreading, to joggers' dismay. Coyotes are reappearing
even within cities like Chicago and Denver.

Published on: Tuesday, 23 October, 2012

The surprising regularity of technological progress

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1965, the computer expert Gordon Moore published his famous little graph showing that the number of
"components per integrated function" on a silicon chip-a measure of
computing power-seemed to be doubling every year and a half. He had
only five data points, but Moore's Law has settled into an almost
iron rule of innovation. Why is it so regular?

Published on: Sunday, 14 October, 2012

Epigenetics matters, but not between generations

This week's award of the Nobel Prize for medicine to John Gurdon
and Shinya Yamanaka effectively recognizes the science of
epigenetics. Dr. Gurdon showed that almost any cell (in a frog)
contains all the genetic information to become an adult. What makes
the cell develop a certain way is a pattern of "epigenetic"
modifications to the DNA specific to each tissue-turning genes on
and off. Dr. Yamanaka showed that if you can remove that epigenetic
modification (in a mouse) you can reprogram a cell to be an
embryo.

Yet to most people the word "epigenetics" has come to mean
something quite different: the inheritance of nongenetic features
acquired by a parent. Most scientists now think the latter effect
is rare, unimportant and hugely overhyped.

There are several mechanisms of modifying DNA without altering
the genetic code itself. The key point is that these modifications
survive the division of cells.

Published on: Saturday, 06 October, 2012

After 15 years, the ecological and economic dividends are big

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on genetically modified crops:

Generally, technologies are judged on their net benefits, not on
the claim that they are harmless: The good effects of, say, the
automobile and aspirin outweigh their dangers. Today, arguably,
adopting certain new technologies is harder not just because of a
policy of precaution but because of a bias in much of the media
against reporting the benefits.

Shale gas is one example, genetically modified food another,
where the good news is deemed less newsworthy than the bad. A
recent French study claimed that both pesticides and GM corn fed
to cancer-susceptible strains of rats produced an increase in
tumors. The study has come in for withering criticism from
mainstream scientists for its opaque data, small samples,
unsatisfactory experimental design and unconventional statistical
analysis, yet it has still gained headlines world-wide. (In
published responses, the authors have stood by their results.)

Published on: Monday, 01 October, 2012

The psychology of libertarian views

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal finds that just as liberals and conservatives have
predictable personalities, so do libertarians:

An individual's personality shapes his or her political ideology
at least as much as circumstances, background and influences. That
is the gist of a recent strand of psychological research identified
especially with the work of Jonathan Haidt. The baffling (to
liberals) fact that a large minority of working-class white people
vote for conservative candidates is explained by psychological
dispositions that override their narrow economic interests.

Published on: Sunday, 23 September, 2012

It's happened before

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is about the retreat of Arctic Sea Ice and what it
means:

This week probably saw the Arctic Ocean's sea ice reach its
minimum extent for the year and begin to expand again, as it
usually does in mid-September. Given that the retreat of Arctic ice
has become a key piece of evidence for those who take a more
alarmed view of global warming, it's newsworthy that 2012's melt
was the greatest since records began in 1979, with sea ice in the
Northern Hemisphere shrinking to about 1.3 million square miles, or
about half the 1979-2008 average.

As this column has sometimes pointed out ways in which the
effects of global warming are happening more slowly than predicted,
it is fair to record that this rate of decline in Arctic sea ice is
faster than many predicted. Although an entirely ice-free Arctic
Ocean during at least one week a year is still several decades away
at this rate, we are halfway there after just three decades.

Published on: Thursday, 20 September, 2012

Rachel Carson and Al Gore relied on a tobacco denier

I have an article in the Spectator drawing attention to the
curious fact that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring owed
much to a passionate tobacco denier. It's behind a paywall, but
there it is with the sources as links. Hat tip Ron Bailey.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published 50 years
ago this month, effectively marked the birth of the modern
environmental movement. "Silent Spring came as a cry in the
wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly
written argument that changed the course of history," wrote Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994
edition.

Published on: Sunday, 16 September, 2012

Innovation as an evolutionary process

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street
Journal:

Bill Moggridge, who invented the laptop computer in 1982, died last week. His idea of using a hinge to
attach a screen to a keyboard certainly caught on big, even if the
first model was heavy, pricey and equipped with just 340 kilobytes
of memory. But if Mr. Moggridge had never lived, there is little
doubt that somebody else would have come up with the idea.

The phenomenon of multiple discovery is well known in science.
Innovations famously occur to different people in different places
at the same time. Whether it is calculus (Newton and Leibniz), or
the planet Neptune (Adams and Le Verrier), or the theory of natural
selection (Darwin and Wallace), or the light bulb (Edison, Swan and
others), the history of science is littered with disputes over
bragging rights caused by acts of simultaneous discovery.

Published on: Sunday, 02 September, 2012

Science keeps reminding us that we are not special

My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street
Journal:

The astronomer Martin Rees recently coined the neat phrase "Copernican demotion"
for science's habit of delivering humiliating disappointment to
those who think that our planet is special. Copernicus told us the
Earth was not at the center of the solar system; later astronomers
found billions of solar systems in each of the billions of
galaxies, demoting our home to a cosmic speck.

Mr. Rees says further Copernican demotion may loom ahead. "The
entire panorama that astronomers can observe could be a tiny part
of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which is itself just one bang
among a perhaps-infinite ensemble." Indeed, even our physics could
be a parochial custom: Mr. Rees says that different universes could
be governed by different rules and our "laws of nature" may be
local bylaws.

Published on: Sunday, 19 August, 2012

So did we or didn't we? Last week saw the publication of two new
papers with diametrically opposed conclusions about whether
non-African people have Neanderthal-human hybrids among their
ancestors-a result of at least some interspecies dalliance in the
distant past.

That non-Africans share 1% to 4% of their genomes with
Neanderthals is not in doubt, thanks to the pioneering work of
paleo-geneticists led by the Max Planck Institute's Svante Paabo.
At issue is how to interpret that fact. Dr. Paabo originally
recognized that there are two possible explanations, hybridization
(which got all the press) or "population substructure."

Published on: Sunday, 19 August, 2012

A history of failed predictions of doom

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not
expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic
predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the
prophets of apocalypse always draw a following-from the 100,000
Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the
world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the
Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both
1994 and 2011.

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s
proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from
millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are
becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the
rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar
folk, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to
midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: "The global community
may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe
from changes in Earth's atmosphere."

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since
the success of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth in
1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine.
Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions-we are
now, in writer Gary Alexander's word, apocaholic. The past half century has
brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines,
plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling
sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K
bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish,
cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate
catastrophes.

Published on: Saturday, 11 August, 2012

Rats rescuing rats looks like empathy, but what about ants?

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall
Street Journal:

Identifying unique features of human beings is a cottage
industry in psychology. In his book "Stumbling on Happiness," the Harvard
psychologist Daniel Gilbert jokes that every member of his
profession lives under the obligation at some time in his career to
complete a sentence which begins: "The human being is the only
animal that..." Those who have completed the sentence with phrases
like "makes tools," "is conscious" or "can imitate" have generally
now conceded that some other animals also have these traits.

Plenty of human uniqueness remains. After all, uniqueness is
everywhere in the biological world: Elephants and worms also have
unique features. As fast as one scientist demotes human beings from
being unique in one trait, another scientist comes up with a new
unique trait: grandparental care, for instance, or extra spines on
the pyramidal cells of our prefrontal cortex.

Published on: Saturday, 04 August, 2012

Climate science needs gadflies

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is the third in the series on confirmation bias.

I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias-the
tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when
assessing a theory in science-is to avoid monopoly. So long as
there are competing scientific centers, some will prick the bubbles
of theory reinforcement in which other scientists live.

Published on: Saturday, 28 July, 2012

What keeps scientists accurate is rivals' scepticism, not their own

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal:

If, as I argued last week, scientists are just as prone as
everybody else to confirmation bias ­ to looking for evidence to
support rather than test their ideas ­ then how is it that science,
unlike cults and superstitions, does change its
mind and find new things?

The answer was spelled out by the psychologist Raymond Nickerson
of Tufts University in a paper written in 1998: "It is not so much
the critical attitude that individual scientists have taken with
respect to their own ideas that has given science the success it
has enjoyed... but more the fact that individual scientists have
been highly motivated to demonstrate that hypotheses that are held
by some other scientist(s) are false."

Published on: Sunday, 22 July, 2012

How scientists collect positive evidence rather than test theories

My
latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

There's a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché:
that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing
they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it.
Professors tell students that this is the essence of science.

Yet most scientists behave very differently in practice. They
not only become strongly attached to their own theories; they
perpetually look for evidence that supports rather than challenges
their theories. Like defense attorneys building a case, they
collect confirming evidence.

Published on: Tuesday, 17 July, 2012

Apart from the Martians, that is

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street
Journal

If all goes well next month, Curiosity, NASA's latest mission to
Mars, will land in the Gale crater, a 3.5-billion-year-old,
96-mile-wide depression near the planet's equator. Out will roll a
car-size rover to search for signs of life, among other things. It
will drill into rocks and sample the contents, using a mass
spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.

In the unlikely event that the project finds evidence of life,
then what? In particular, who is in charge of deciding what we
should do if we encounter living Martian creatures?

Published on: Wednesday, 11 July, 2012

Top down design is flawed even in finance

The Times published my op-ed on banking reform:

It is not yet clear whether the current rage against the banks
will do more harm than good: whether we are about to throw the baby
of banking as a vital utility out with the bathwater of banking as
a wasteful casino. But what is clear is that the current mood of
Bankerdämmerung is an opportunity as well as a danger. The fact
that so many people agree that some kind of drastic reform is
needed, all the way along a spectrum from Milibands to mega-Tories,
might just open the window through which far-reaching reform of the
financial system enters.

All the actors involved bear some blame. First, investment
bankers and the principals in financial companies that cluster
around them have trousered an increasing share of the returns from
the financial markets, leaving less for their customers and
shareholders, while getting "too big to fail", so passing their
risks to taxpayers.

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